Craft Weary

I shared a link on FB to a picture of a Christmas tree made out of stacked books. Very cool. My friend Robin ran with it and wrote a story on the trend for her blog at Mother Nature Network. And posted a picture of the book tree she made herself.

I used to do stuff like that. I would see cool ideas at craft shows and such places and try to recreate them. I have a shelf full of craft books in the basement that I used to browse through, looking for ideas for things I wanted to try someday. I watched home improvement TV shows and got all sorts of ideas for things to do to my house. I used to LOVE hands-on creative projects.

Not anymore. I have a cross-stitch piece I started to make for my mother-in-law when I was pregnant with my 11-year-old. It's still not done. That's kind of appalling to me, when I really sit and think about it.

I'm not sure why I don't enjoy crafts anymore. But I think do remember when my shift in attitude occurred. It was during my MOPS years in New Jersey. We did a craft at every MOPS meeting, and I enjoyed those a lot the first year or so. By the end of my MOPS tenure, I was just annoyed at the idea of having another cheap, corny item to find a place for in my house.

I was in charge of planning crafts for the kids in MOPS for a year or two, also, as I recall. I only remember it because I remember trying desperately to come up with crafts that would somehow go away with use -- a snack to be eaten, bathsalts that got poured in the tub, that kind of thing. From Sunday School, church nursery, preschool, MOPS, and any other child care I had the girls at, I had piles of cheap artsy craftsy projects laying around the house that I was tired of looking at.

So maybe it's just the clutter issue. I know I sound more and more like my mother every day, complaining about knick knacks being "just another thing to dust". I'm much more interested these days in crafting words than crafting things . . . and I think I'm a lot better at it. And they store themselves away very neatly on my laptop.